Monday Memo
December 3, 2012
Dear Parents,
I hope everyone had a great weekend! We finished our American Stories unit last week and are starting on our new unit “That’s Amazing”. We ended our unit by performing a play for each other. The students were divided into two “teams” and each had to decide who was the director, narrator and the actors. It was fun watching them perform! I also wanted to thank-you for responding to my email about how you wanted your child to get home after the Christmas program. The 4th grade will be in the vocal music room, so plan to sign your child out at that location.
Going back to reading, as I said above, we will be starting a new unit. Our first story is entitled “The Stranger”. It is an interesting story that is written by the author of The Polar Express. His name is Chris Van Allsburg. We will be working on such skills this week as noting details, compound words, synonyms, and writing an explanation. Our spelling words are attached and are compound words. Our grammar this week is introducing us to action verbs.
In Math this week, we will be finishing up our Chapter 3 over multiplication and division. We will be working on the book test and the chapter test and should be starting Chapter 4 next week. I will talk about that chapter in the next Monday Memo.
We are working on the Southeastern Region of the United States. We have talked about the Mississippi River and its importance to the development of the Southeastern Region. The warm weather and the cash crops grown in this region were also discussed. We will be discussing the resources found in this region this week also.
In Science we are finishing our discussion of the systems of the body. We talked about the skeletal, muscular, circulatory and respiratory systems last week. We will finish this week by talking about the nervous, digestive, and excretory systems. It is so interesting to talk about this marvelous machine that is our body.
For Christmas this year, I would like to have the students do a
“Pay it Forward” concept. With that, if the students could think of a way to help
a neighbor, friend, relative… They could scoop a sidewalk for someone, send
a Christmas card to anyone including their nursing home friends, they could
bake some cookies (with your permission of course) and give those to
anyone, write letters or stories to give as gifts, spend an hour or so visiting
with an elderly person that maybe doesn’t get visitors very often… The list
goes on. On Mondays, we have Share Day. For the month of December, our
Share Day will consist of them talking about the ways they have tried to “Pay
It Forward”. Hopefully they can see that doing things like this aren’t monetary
but require them to give of themselves.
We are also going to have a food pantry drive as a school. We are going to start collecting food items, consumable items… There is a contest between the classes for the class that collects the most items. It is just a small incentive to continue our holiday tradition of giving at Christmas time at Jacobson Elementary. You can send these food pantry items anytime before December 14th. Thank-you in advance for that.
Lastly, instead of buying Christmas gifts for each other, if you would like to send $2.00 with your child to school, we will donate the money to the Belmond Cheer Fund. That is a truly wonderful organization. I will match the contribution made by the students.
I hope everyone has a great weekend!!
Sincerely,
Chris Mallen
Phone: 444-3093 (Home) 444-4300 ext. 336 (School)
Email: chris.mallen@belmond-klemme.k12.ia.us
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